Welcome, one and all, to the very first Web Curios EVER not to be written under a Conservative government!
What do you mean ‘it all looks dispiritingly familiar, you’ve not even given the place a lick of paint ffs’?!
Ok, so the election wasn’t all good news – loads of people simply couldn’t be bothered to vote, and a troubling proportion of those that did chose to put their ‘X’ in a box marked ‘racist, frog-faced haunted ashtray’ – but, equally, at least I can now forget that Michael Fabricant was ever anything other than a middlingly-successful mobile DJ who once worked under the nom d’arte of ‘Mickey Fab’ (this is 100% true, by the way).
Anway, enough of all that, there are a fortnight of links for you to get through while you wait for the nice man in the blacked-out beemer to show with the seventeen grammes of cheap cocaine you’ve ordered to ‘get you through’ on Sunday. To be clear, if England win then I hope all your gak is cut with strychnine.
I am still Matt, this is still Web Curios, and after Sunday we are never, ever going to talk about football again.
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.1:
- All The MPs: Apologies to those of you who really couldn’t give less of a fcuk about the conclusion of the DEMOCRATIC JAMBOREE over here in the UK, but we’re going to kick off with some political content this week because I figure at least one or two of you might find it interesting or useful. First up, this link – a directory of every single MP now in the Commons, with links to information (mostly empty at present given, well, a large proportion of them have barely got their name badges yet) about their voting records, their debate interventions, their expenses (again, when published)…this is hacked together from various different datasources, you can set up alerts to track the activity of Parliamentarians you’re particularly interested in tracking, and, generally, this feels like a really useful thing (in particular, if any of you have a friend or relative who is FAR TOO INTERESTED in politics, this is basically going to be like crack for them).
- Parse The Bill: POLITICS X AI! It’s like all my Christmases have come at once (in that I hate Christmas)! This is actually a pretty smart-looking bit of lightweight LLM use, taking select pieces of legislation passing through Parliament (right now it’s ‘select pieces of legislation which *have* passed though Parliament, but one assumes more will be added in due course as the machine once again starts to grind) and using…some AI or another to summarise and explain each, offer you an overview of objections, present summaries of the changes that the Bill underwent at each stage of its passage through Parliament…beautifully this is all rather undermined by the (entirely necessary) disclaimer which says in big letters (I paraphrase, but) “there is a significant possibility that everything you’re about to read here bears no actual relation to the legislation in question, LLMs lol amirite?!?’, which does slightly undermine its utility, but it’s a neat way of getting an overview of new Bills as they come through (maybe).
- All Of The Labour Ministers On Twitter: A Twitter List! Just like it’s 2012! How retro! Still, if you want what seems to be a pretty comprehensive list of the current Cabinet in one place, here it is.
- A Bunch of Campaign Trail Photos: I know, I know, after 6 weeks of campaigning there’s a large part of you that never, ever wants to see Starmer’s Easter Island head or Sunak’s sad, diminutive frame ever again (in the case of Starmer, good luck with that) – for the rest of you, though, this collection of campaign photography by one Stefan Rousseau is a nice overview of the sort of weird images that end up being produced of electioneering politicians; there are some lovely (mad) shots in here, including a particularly brutal one of Mr & Mrs Sunak outside Downing Street after his concession speech where she really does look like his mum come to pick him up after school, bless. Oh, and here are some behind-the-scenes shots of the press pack on tour, which reinforces my long-standing belief that being a political journalist is a really miserable job on pretty much every level and one which you have to be a peculiar kind of weirdo to enjoy (to any such ‘weirdos’ reading this, that was obviously meant with immense affection).
- The Internet Phonebook:. I might have mentioned before (of course I have; this has been going for 13 years now, I simply am not interesting enough not to repeat myself over that sort of timeframe) that the first time I ever used the internet it was with the assistance of an actual, physical book which purported to contain ALL OF THE WEBSITES IN THE WORLD (in fairness, in 1995, that would actually have been possible). Well now someone is doing it again! Friend of Curios Kris, of Naive and TinyAwards fame, and Elliot Cost, write: “We are creating a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators. We are seeking personal, poetic, and human websites. If you would like your site to be considered for the first edition, click the link below to submit your website and we will get back to you.” This is as much an artwork as anything else – the site lets you submit your site for consideration should you so desire (or, presumably, anyone else’s), so get involved if you want your slightly-ephemeral HTML stylings to be rendered in slightly-less-ephemeral paper and ink.
- Pivot to AI: Despite Tony Blair’s slightly-ridiculous boosterism this week (if you happened to hear any headlines about his Institute’s research into the potential public sector benefits of AI, by the way, it’s worth also reading said research so you can see that, on page 7-8, it explains that the way the researchers arrived at their conclusion that AI could save the public sector £37bn a year was (I am not joking) BY ASKING CHATGPT), it does feel rather that we’re reaching the stage in the AI hype cycle where people start to Have Doubts (see the longreads section for more) – this site, in the vein of ‘Web3 Is Going Great’ by Molly White, curates the latest news on why perhaps this AI stuff is all bunkum and all the people involved with it breathless snake oil floggers (fwiw, I don’t think it’s all bunkum but I do think it’s very frothy, if that makes sense).
- OpenVibe: This is *really* interesting – 100% not for me, but really interesting. OpenVibe is basically a prototypical service which *should*, if you can be bothered to wrestle with the fundamental unfriendliness of decentralised social media (I am sorry but life is TOO SHORT for Mastodon instances), create a single, unified feed across from all your various different networks into one timeline – so you can pull your feed from Mastodon, Bluesky, Nostr and even Threads into a single, solitary source, and post to each from one place. Which, to be clear, is very much The Dream for the decentralised social model and which is The Way It Was Meant To Work – I just can’t shake the feeling that, at present, it’s all a bit too ‘tofu and homemade granola’ for your average web user and that until you can make all this stuff happen without really thinking about it then we’re going to be stuck with the big, centralised platforms (or, perhaps more accurately, til Meta makes this all work for the middle of the bell curve). Still, please do let me know how you get on with this should you try it, am genuinely curious.
- Some AI Video Examples (Again): I feel I need to put a quick caveat here – ‘fcuk’s sake Matt’, I almost hear you mutter, ‘NOONE CARES’ – and explain that I link to all this AI stuff not out of implicit endorsement but because I think it is interesting; to be very clear, though, I would personally prefer it if we weren’t all rendered entirely professionally obsolete by The Machine, and that we didn’t render our planet entirely-uninhabitable while that happened. BUT, also, I think that if you can’t be curious about the sudden, semi-magical ability to conjure words and images out of nothing then, well, that’s a bit sad too. ANYWAY. Sorry. This is a thread on Twitter by one of those AI booster accounts (sorry) which collects a dozen or so examples of best-in-class recent RunwayML/DreamStudio outputs – as I keep saying with this stuff, it is nowhere near good enough to do anything serious with yet…except this time there are at least two of these where I watched and I thought ‘you know, you could probably actually use this for 2-3s in a TV spot’, from which it is only a very small leap to ‘well, if we made sure that the whole of the spot is just a series of short scenes, no more than 1-3s each…’, and, well, you can see where this is going, right?
- All The Cannes Lions Stuff: Seeing as I just did the Bad Thing and mentioned advertising, may as well chuck this here – this is a link to a Google Drive folder featuring a quite spectacular trove of case studies from this year’s Cannes Lions – every single category, every single entry (seemingly at least), every single metal winner – each with its own one-page case study explaining the ‘INSIGHT’, the creative and the outcome, each with its own unique-yet-strangely-familiar hyperbolic style (“Only 27% of teenage boys are proud of their testicles; that means 73% of teenagers, nearly three quarters of our young men, are suffering TESTICLE SHAME – we knew that Dr Pepper had to act swiftly to change this and make an impact. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”). I have to confess that I have only glanced at a couple of these as, well, I simply don’t care about this stuff anymore, at all, still, if you’re the sort of person who feels your chances of still having a job in 12 months time depends on bringing home one of these fcukers in 2025, then you could do worse than getting one of your AEs to spend a day uploading all of these to an LLM and crafting a custom prompt to develop Lion-winning ideas for whatever brief you fancy (this is a legitimately not-terrible idea which I can’t believe I’m giving you for free – look, you can even use Google Notebook to do it you fcuking ingrates, don’t say I never do anything for you).
- NoPlace: The latest in the seemingly-neverending wave of web1.0 fetishism, the HOT NEW APP FOR TEENS (so I am told, anyway) is NoPlace, which is the latest iteration of ‘MySpace, but for a new generation!’. It literally *is* MySpace – there are friend lists, you can pin songs to your profile, there’s a degree of customisability and a vaguely-retro aesthetic to the whole thing, Very much not one for me – or, in all likelihood, you either – but you may have kids or siblings or nephews or whatever who might be into it (although I imagine that ‘recommending a new social platform to a child’ in 2024 is likely to elicit the same sort of response from the concerned adults in their lives as ‘sitting down and reassuring them that there *are* safe ways to consume fentanyl’). I did enjoy this particular faq, though: “what if i encounter bad vibes? we are doing our best to build a solid community with noplace, but the haters will still get in. we have community rules in place to make noplace a place for everyone. there are features that allow u to block, mute, and report users who have problematic behavior.” Honestly, “WHAT IF I ENCOUNTER BAD VIBES?” should be in every single employee induction handbook from now on.
- Adimverse: On the one hand, this looks like quite a cool idea and I can see the potential; on the other, I am slightly annoyed that it’s backed by Rob McElhenny, who I’m sure is a perfectly nice man but who I don’t personally want to enrich any further by promoting his portfolio projects. Still, this could be of interest to some of you – the idea here is it’s a creative collaboration platform, where people post their ideas for projects, recruit people to work on said projects alongside them, find other talent…there’s also a degree of rights management apparently built into the platform to help smooth the often rocky path towards rights sharing. OBVIOUSLY it’s on the blockchain – OBVIOUSLY – but, in a pleasingly non-obnoxious move, there’s no mention anywhere of wallets or coins, and there’s seemingly no attempt to turn this into a MLM. This is, basically, a DAO-ish enterprise but without the web3cryptoguff around it, and it seems like it *might* be worth a look if you have an idea in search of a creative team to bring it to live. Still, though, it would be nice if it wasn’t all in the service of making an already-violently-rich man even richer.
- Moshi: This is slightly incredible, even if at present it’s not much more than a really fancy demo-toy-thing. Moshi is…I think it’s a French initiative, and I think the LLM it’s using is its own open source variant, but to be honest I’m not sure and you almost certainly don’t care anyway. What makes this interesting is the voice interface, and the speed at which it works – try it in your browser and it really is quite amazing the first time you give it a go, with The Machine occasionally even interrupting you it’s so quick to understand and respond. The magic is slightly undermined when you realise that what it’s saying bears, in most cases at least, absolutely no relation whatsoever to real life or fact, but its a very cool party trick and the low-latency really is transformative from a UX point of view.
- The ElevenLabs Reader: A GENUINELY USEFUL PIECE OF AI SOFTWARE! No, really! Fine, it’s iOS-only (you can sign up here to get an alert when they launch the Android version if you like), but ElevenLabs new reader app – which will read out anything you tell it to, in decently human-sounding tones, whenever you want – feels like it could be really, really handy in a whole host of scenarios.
- Jen Music: Another text-to-music tool! Except THIS ONE IS ETHICAL! Yes, that’s right, Jen’s unique gimmick is that “With over 40 fully-licensed catalogs in its initial training set, Jen adheres to a strict training doctrine that emphasizes its commitment to transparency, compensation and copyright identification. Jen’s rigorous compliance process sets it apart from the pack. Every track is automatically vetted for audio recognition and copyright identification utilizing a database of 150M tracks. This includes both the compositions in the training set and every newly generated track on the platform. Further, Jen generates a cryptographic hash for each track that is then recorded on The Root Network blockchain. This process provides an advanced form of verification, ensuring the integrity and timestamp of each track’s creation.” So, basically, it’s trained on licensed stuff and it’s also designed to it won’t spit out anything that violates copyright – which is great! Except, er, when you try it, and it’s about 10% as good as Udio, Suno and the rest, suggesting that actually training these things on massive amounts of copyrighted material actually might be necessary to make them work. Which, if nothing else, will keep the lawyers in clover for a few years yet.
- Mosquepedia: Photographs of gorgeous mosques from around the world, information about their design, and occasionally accompanying architectural drawings and plans too, for anyone serious about getting into the ‘designing beautiful religious buildings’ game (seriously, some of the architecture here is astonishing).
- The D-Day Map: This is a LOVELY educational resource – the National Museum of the Royal Navy has put together this interactive map-cum-guide to the D-Day landings, from preparations to the aftermath, all presented on a massive map with small models offering a lo-fi animated depiction of troop and unit movement at each phase of the operation. Honestly, this is really nicely-done and it’s worth a look if you’re interested in the history – note that the clickable area on the landing page ‘start’ button is a bit iffy, but if you hover just over the text you should be able to get in).
- Natural Language Colour Picker: ANOTHER great use of an LLM! No, seriously! This is a colour finder which lets you basically describe the hue you want in whatever florid, descriptive terms you fancy and will provide you with the colour AS IF BY MAGIC! I have no idea how consistent this stuff is – I suspect NOT AT ALL – but I really like the idea of being able to go into a client meeting and say with confidence ‘yeah, we’ve gone with this particular hue because we’ve used AI to determine that it is actually the colour of migraine’, or ‘we think it’s important that the male lead’s jumper be in #FF3300 because that’s actually ‘the colour of a man’s face who believes that his marital infidelity has been discovered’ and we think that that sort of subtle easter egg will really engage the online audience’.
- A Taxonomy of Swears: “Swear words and profanities from around the world!” proclaims the website, all of the arranged on a vertical, scrolling scale, from least offensive at the top to the very worst words EVER at the bottom. Various languages are covered, and there’s a colour-key to help you distinguish between profanities of a sexual, familial or scatological insults. This is obviously GREAT, and, even better, there’s an option to submit your own terms for consideration – I really want this to become some sort of profanity thermometer, an objective ranking of THE WORST THINGS YOU CAN EVER SAY, although I will forever argue against ‘cnut’ being deemed the ne plus ultra of profanity (on a purely personal level, I have always found being called a ‘pr1ck’ far more offensive) (but please don’t).
- Realise: A website to promote the single ‘Realise’ by the band Hearse Pileup – it’s a relatively-simple Outrun-style driving game, in stylised black and white, running at pace through a selection of cityscapes as you attempt to avoid obstacles and collect cash. There are CHOICES TO MAKE! There is a MESSAGE! I really enjoyed this – there’s a touch of the Ace Of Spades about the track, which is no bad thing, and the whole thing is short enough to be a nice bit of engaging fun. MORE STANDALONE WEBSITES AS MUSIC VIDEOS PLEASE!
- New Food at the Minnesota State Fair: Long-term readers may know that I have something of an obsession with the preposterously-calorific menu items dreamed up each year for the various state fairs of the US; this is basically now a virality contest, with the various venders trying to come up with something that will go viral like ‘deep fried butter’ did a few years ago (I am not sh1tting you, that was literally a thing – cubes of butter, deep-frozen, breaded and then deep-fried; can you *imagine* what that would do to your insides?!) – this year’s selection of ‘no, fcuk off, that is not fit for human consumption’ comestibles come from Minnesota, and highlights include deep-fried ranch dressing (a concept so vile I am honestly doing those small swallows people do right before yakking, not one word of a lie) and (and I have to quote this one in full) “kettle chip-flavored ice cream created by Minnesota Dairy Lab, sandwiched between focaccia bread from Wrecktangle Pizza. Topped with a blend of honey butter, kettle chips and herbs.” THIS STUFF IS WHY REDDIT IS FULL OF COMMENTS FROM PEOPLE WITH TERRIBLE BOWEL ISSUES, AMERICA.
THE SECTION WHICH IS GENUINELY THRILLED TO IMAGINE ALL THE FRENZIED GROUPCHATS HAPPENING AROUND THE UK RIGHT NOW AS THE UK’S MEN COMPETE TO SEE WHO CAN BECOME THIS YEAR’S ‘AR$E-FLARE MAN’, PT.2:
- The Swype 30k: How often do you see or hear things that make you think ‘yeah, I mean, we’re fcuked, aren’t we?’ I hope, honestly, that it’s rare, that you’re not constantly muttering under your breath about how WE’RE ALL DOOMED – I mean, I’m definitely not doing that, oh no siree – but it’s reasonable to assume that the constant whirling assault of modernity will occasionally throw up some in-feed content that makes you…somewhat concerned as to the likely trajectory of our future. So it was this week when I encountered an ad for the Swype 30k, a newly-announced brand of disposable vape (remember, DISPOSABLE) which not only lets you inhale variously-flavoured particulate matter to your heart’s content but which also comes equipped with, er, Bluetooth, and an OLED screen, and the ability to link to your social media accounts, and Spotify, so it’s basically an entirely-disposable smartwatch. AMAZING. On the one hand, let’s make sure we’re doing our recycling – on the other, let’s also churn out 100,000k units of these fcukers! Still, maybe this is made out of a revolutionary new class of entirely-biodegradable electronics and plastics, right? Right? Er, hello?
- The Doolittle Prize: Ok, yes, fine, it’s not TECHNICALLY called the Doolittle prize, but it ought to be. Existing pretty much at the opposite end of the intellectual/’hope for the species’ spectrum as the previous link, this is ‘the Coller Dolittle Challenge for Interspecies Two-Way Communication. A Grand Prize of USD$10mln will be awarded for “cracking the code” with annual prizes of USD$100,000 to support successful applicants with their research to develop scientifically rigorous models and algorithms for coherent communication with non-human organisms until interspecies communication is achieved.’ So, basically, ‘can you use AI to help us talk to dogs? Great, we’ll give you ten million quid’ (I simplify, but only slightly). On the one hand this is obviously BRILLIANT and I am 100% here for this sort of funding; on the other, where do we go when we finally get the opportunity to TALK TO THE ANIMALS and we finally learn that they think we’re d1cks. WHAT THEN????
- Volv: I’ve long tired of the slightly-smug epithet ‘a stupid person’s idea of a clever person’, but, if I can paraphrase that, this really is a stupid person’s idea of a clever idea. Volv promises to give you ALL THE NEWS YOU NEED, but in, er, nine-second snippets. Why nine seconds? Because, apparently, ‘that’s all our TikTok addled brains can take’ (SCIENCE!) – so instead of, I don’t know, working to get your attention span back, why not lean into that degradation by downloading an app that promises you summarise EVERYTHING YOU COULD POSSIBLY NEED TO KNOW in small infobites that can be consumed in less than 10 seconds each. Take a moment to think about the top 5 significant news stories happening today wherever you may be. Now think about how you might communicate those stories in a manner which preserves their nuance and complexity, that communicates a necessary quantity of information and context, in nine seconds. Hard, isn’t it? I remain unconvinced that the GENIUS MINDS behind Volv have quite nailed this, but if you find the idea of the ‘…For Dummies’ series of books too intellectually daunting for you to cope with then perhaps this is for you.
- A Song Map of Canada: This is a LOVELY idea. One man, on a bike, cycling across Canada, following a route mapped by song lyrics. “Canada has no shortage of lyrics that pay tribute to the places people call home, with songs like Alberta Bound, Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon, Sudbury Saturday Night, Farewell to Nova Scotia, and Bobcaygeon to name an obvious few. Whether it’s rock, pop, folk, or blues there are countless artists of all genres, traditions, and communities with songs that tell the stories about the places we live. The Great Canadian Song Cycle is an unsupported (no van following along) bicycle trip across Canada with a focus on collecting songs about places. The end goal is to provide a song map of Canada populated by artists and their fans, and random interviews en route.” This has apparently just started, and there are minimal updates so far, but there’s a map and a list of songs, and I think this is just a lovely idea for a trip (for someone with significantly stronger calves than I possess).
- A Computer Vision Gallery: A curated collection of AI-created artworks pulled together by the Seattle Convention Centre – these are fascinating, a really interesting selection of different styles and techniques and models being employed by the various artists in question. I do think that anyone who out-of-hand dismisses any art made with AI as ‘not art’ should probably take a look at stuff like this and think again – there’s a categorical difference between ‘artist making work with models’ and ‘person typing prompt into Midjourney’, and this stuff is definitely the former.
- Paint’N’Play: This is quite fun – a tool from the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC which lets you paint in the style of various different artists; effectively this just cycles the paintbrush through four or five different shapes, but they’re done well enough to mimic the styles of Van Gogh, Constable or others and the way in which you can mix and match the different stroke styles allows for some surprisingly-interesting effects (or it would if you were more artistically-inclined than I am; all my stuff looks like dogsick). Try drawing a Van Gogh-style portrait, it is FCUKING HARD – so fair play Vince, you were actually pretty good.
- Large Horse: This is a single-serving joke, but I am very much into the commitment to the bit and the use of subdomains as a comedy vehicle, something which, personally speaking, I don’t think you see enough of. COMEDY SUBDOMAINS FTW!
- Find The UK’s Hellmouths: Matt Round has somehow found a document listing the official location of every single one of the UK’s 700+ hellmouths, and has mapped them for you here – see where YOUR nearest one is. Then spend a good 10 minutes getting annoyed with yourself as you try and work out which actual, real-world datasat Matt has used to populate this, and then wonder whether or not their PR team will get in touch to complain should they ever find out about this.
- BossManChickFillA: The TikTok account of a fried chicken shop in Preston, Northern England, which consists mostly of them posting videos of their customers coming in after having had a few drinks of an evening. This is actually really lovely – it’s good-natured and feels nice, not sneery, and is a gently-comic look at life in a standard English town when you’re young and p1ssed and REALLY need a chicken shish with everything on NO LETTUCE! Although I have to say that the footage of all the kids celebrating after the football on Tuesday makes me so, so scared for Sunday night that I might have to stop writing here and just take 70 Xanax.
- Noiys: This is a very simple anonymous messaging site – anyone can log on and post a message anonymously and it will disappear in 24, and it’s obviously been hacked together by a kid somewhere, and it’s…weirdly, I found myself quite invested in this this week. You won’t read anything particularly profound or hilarious and most of it’s just nonsense posted by people who I reckon are probably on average about 12 years old…but also there’s something sort of fascinating about it, like looking at an antfarm or something, and it made me think of how this is what so much of the young adult experience is in 2024, these streams of strangers sharing text messages across Discord channels or Slack channels or Telegrams or weird little websites like this, so ephemeral and yet so persistent…no idea where I am going with this, but I found this a curious-if-pointless ‘slice of modernity’ and maybe you will too.
- All Of The Playlists: Oh, ok, fine, not ALL of them, but a VERY SIGNIFICANT NUMBER. “OK Mondays was a near weekly playlist spanning genres and moods, published from January 2nd, 2017 through January 1st, 2024. This page serves as a searchable index and archive of all playlists in the project.” So that’s somewhere in the region of 350+ playlists, all hand-curated, which, based on a quick scan of some of the tracklistings, span a truly remarkable selection of genres…this should be an instant bookmark imho.
- Some Interesting VTubers: While I’m not personally ever likely to get into the whole VTubing thing – I’m reasonably-relaxed about ‘the trappings of adulthood’, but at the same time draw the line at being the sort of 44 year old man who watches an anime e-boy with dragon ears and considers that to be legitimate entertainment – I am fascinated about the creativity evident in what some of these people are doing and how they do it. This Twitter thread presents a few examples of people pushing the envelope in terms of what it’s possible to do with Twitch and a mocap rig – there are a couple in here combining it with a hand-drawn animation style which I am in awe of.
- 4Chan’s Top 100 Books Ever: This is interesting – even if only from a sort of cultural analysis viewpoint. You all know what 4Chan is – each year the site does a member poll on THE BEST BOOKS EVER – one enterprising Channer has gone through all of the lists to date to compile THE UBERLIST, based on rankings over time, and you can see them all here. This is pretty much what you’d expect in many respects, but I was pleasingly surprised to see that it wasn’t ALL male (just, er, massively, overwhelmingly so) – it’s obviously super-American and super-Western and super-white in its bias (also, there is no universe in which ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ should be anywhere near any top books list – what is it with American men and their obsession with that novel?), but it’s an interesting look into ‘what forms the mindset of an average super-online Western teenage boy in 2024’. Slightly embarrassed by how many of these I’ve read tbh, but in my defence I have read a LOT (and I have read 80% of the collected works of Jilly Cooper and I bet none of the Chan fcukers can say THAT).
- Lettre: I feel slightly like I am ageing into a different part of the web. Partly this is my insistence on experiencing it primarily via desktop, which automatically siphons me towards A Certain Demographic, but it’s genuinely arresting to me when I get served stuff like this, which is, objectively, for Older People – I mean, look, it’s an fcuking iPad-first app! I am not old enough for iPad first apps! Except, er, it also looks quite interesting, I must say – it’s basically a penpalling app, where anyone can write letters (handwritten, obvs – again, AIMED AT OLD PEOPLE FFS) and if you like the look of a letter then you can reply to it in-app…basically like a sort of a reskinning of the basic concept of ‘forums’ for people who would be very scared of the concept of ‘forums’ but who are still very big fans indeed of ‘handwritten epistolary correspondence’. Ngl, if I had an iPad (WHICH I DON’T BECAUSE I AM NOT THAT OLD) I would totally give this a go.
- Not Quite Past: A LEGITIMATELY GOOD USE OF AI! MACHINE-IIMAGINED TILEWARE! “Not Quite Past trains AI to make beautiful things. Our first project explores classic Dutch Delftware tiles and lets you make your own. Make your own tile in our Workshop or pick one that’s already been made in our Marketplace. We then get it made in a kiln in the Staffordshire Potteries and sent to your door.” This is really fun, and quite a cool way of making yourself something bespoke and unique and secretly-geeky which will also look rather nice in your newly-refurbed kitchen.
- Buy A Stegosaurus: Yes, ok, there are other lots available at this forthcoming auction at Sotheby’s, but there is only one star attraction and that star attraction is Apex, a mounted stegosaurus skeleton which is estimated to go for a mere $4-6m dollars, making it the perfect adornment for your front garden. You can also get a T-Rex tooth for a mere $50k or so, though, which frankly feels like the sort of thing your kids can probably sacrifice their university fund for (tell them to become plumbers, seriously, it’s a better bet in the long run anyway).
- Dawn Chorus: Via blort, ALL OF THE BIRD SOUNDS! This is lovely – recordings of the dawn chorus from all over the world, mapped, which you can listen to to your heart’s content. It’s weird how evocative the different sounds of different birds’ songs can be – there’s a qualitative difference to what it sounds like to wake up in Rome to what it sounds like to wake up in London (and yet the taste of the tears in the morning is tediously-uniform, how queer!). This has been going for a few years now, and there’s an app which you can download should you want to record your own sounds and contribute them to the project – 100% lovely, this, no notes.
- Insect Photos: Got to be honest, I’m a *bit* of an entomaphobe and so these images make me itch like billy-o, but they’re also amazing in the way that only massively-close up photos of, say, beetles can be. THEY ARE LIKE TERRIFYING ORGANIC TRANSFORMERS! THEY ARE LIKE JEWELLED DEATH MACHINES! PRAY THEY NEVER GROW TO 100x THEIR SIZE! Anyway, this is the page featuring the nominations for the Royal Entomological Society’s annual photo contest, and these are GORGEOUS, especially the one of the termites which isn’t something I thought I would ever type.
- Chrono Piano: Ooh, this is both mathematically-pleasing and melodically-pretty and I very much enjoy it. “Chrono Piano is a live music player generates piano music based on the current date and time. Each digit from the date and time corresponds to a musical note. The date digits create the bass and the time digits form the melody.” Can we please have a clock in a public place that uses something like this to produce sounds, please?
- One Checkbox: You remember that ‘One Million Checkboxes’ site from the other week? Well this is that, but…smaller. It made me do a small lol, and may do the same for you.
- Where’s Wally?: Ok, so for excellent reasons of copyright this isn’t in fact called Where’s Wally? – but, well, that’s exactly what it is. I think it’s a promo for some New Zealand-based agency or something, given that all the various places in which you’re charged with finding a character in the throng are NZ locations, but, honestly, who cares? FIND THE MAN IN THE RUBBER RING! FIND THE LAUGHING OLD LADY! BEAT THE CLOCK! I am so, so bad at this it made me quite angry and I had to stop playing after a few fruitless minutes, but you may get significantly more out of it (you fcukers).
- The King Is Watching: Finally in this week’s miscellanea, A GREAT GAME! And one which will tide you over nicely til 8pm on Sunday night (PLEASE GOD SPAIN PLEASE GOD) – it’s quite hard to explain but easy to pick up, and all you really need to know is that a) you need to protect your kingdom fro hordes of ravening goblins; and b) noone does anything unless THE KING IS WATCHING. Seriously, this is great fun and is distracting enough that it kept my mind off the horrendous prospect of a potential England victory for a good 10 minutes.
THE CIRCUS OF TUMBLRS!
- Anime Computers: Depictions of computing devices in anime – partly just cool, and partly a really interesting look at how culture has seen, reflected and conceived of computers over the past 50-odd years.
THE TROUGH OF (INSTA) FEEDS!
- Sonder Solutions: Sonder Solutions are a German art collective that do odd little performances that riff on stereotypes of national identity and ORDER and probably all sorts of other stuff that I don’t understand because, well, everything they do is in German. Still, their Insta feed is full of pleasingly-nonsensical (to me at least) videos of them doing things like ‘pointless roadworks, very slowly, in a TINY SILVER DIGGER’ and, honestly, who doesn’t need a bit of in-feed Tuetonic surrealism? NO FCUKER, etc!
LONG THINGS THAT ARE LONG!
- What Is A Majority For?: In what I PROMISE will be the last bit of UK politics-focused writing in here for at least a few weeks, this is James Butler in the LRB writing about the election and what the incoming Labour Government has on its plate, and how we might expect it to approach the myriad issues facing us. This is…look, it’s a pretty sombre reflection, as befits the whole ‘worst economic status since WWII’ thing (although, er, does that mean we can expect the same sort of achievements as those enacted by the Atlee government, then? GREAT!), and the other ‘hm, you really like the Private Sector Partnerships idea, don’t you, and we’ve been here before’ thing – but, equally, however cynical and embittered and pessimistic you are (and, reader, I am VERY), it’s been impossible this week not to feel like there’s been a slight lightening of the mood, a sense that, at the very least, the people currently in government aren’t total fcuking shits (they might still end up being, mind, so don’t get complacent). The bar was limbo-low, fine, but good to see them managing to clear it comfortably nonetheless. Although, and apologies if this applies to any of you reading this, if I hear one more person use the appallingly-twee formulation ‘the grown-ups are back in charge’ or any variants thereof I can’t promise I won’t do some sort of appalling dirty protest on the spot.
- How To Raise Your AI: This is a few weeks old now, but it’s a really interesting chat between Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell on the subject of AI, machine ‘intelligence’ and learning, and how to think about All Of This Stuff. Sensible, level-headed and pleasingly factual throughout – no woo-woo predictions, no fearmongering, no boosterism, just a reasonably-level-headed discussion about the current state of AI and LLMs, the extent to which the speakers believe that this is or isn’t a path to ‘better’ AI, the problem of embodiment and all that good stuff. This is a really good overview of where the smart thinking is at the moment on the topic, imho, and worth reading as a ‘we are here’-type primer.
- That Goldman Report on AI: Many of you will have read Ed Zitron’s latest ‘AI IS ALL A SCAM!’ screed – or at least seen it floating around the web – but this link is to the Goldman Sachs report that is his piece’s subject. The report is GS’ most recent research document in which they go deep on a particular issue, in this case ‘are we spending too much on AI based on the potential benefits it may accrue?’ , and the answer is…mixed. The big headlines that Zitron took were from Jim Covello of Goldman and his bold statements that AI won’t be able to do the stuff that it needs to do to make serious money because it can’t solve complex problems – which, it’s true, is a pretty damning assessment. It’s also accompanied by a statement that basically says ‘but that doesn’t matter even if I’m right, because there’s so much money sloshing around that it makes sense to keep investing in it anyway because, either way, we will still win!’. Which rather changes the conclusions here if you ask me – the point is less ‘AI is a bust!’ and more ‘AI is going to fcuk us whether or not it’s a bust or otherwise because so many people have a vested interest in selling and implementing it, and even if all it achieves is efficiencies rather than transformative change that is going to be more than enough to make lots of people very very rich and lots of other people very, very unemployed’. WE SHALL SEE.
- Antiquity to Alt-Right: Oh this is good – I have been waiting for someone to write a neat ‘look, this is how the whole ‘classical civilisations were great!’ to ‘I am now an actual fascist’ pipeline works’ piece and here it is! Tallulah Trevezant writes: “The association between the ancient world and contemporary extremist political ideologies is well known among career classicists and amateur historians alike. For example, the etymology of ‘fascism’ is derived from fasces – bundled rods with protruding axe blades carried by lictors during the Roman Republic, signifying imperium, the power of the state. Not only is the association widely-known, it has a long history: in 1922, Benito Mussolini’s government – considered by some to be the first government to be known as fascist – envisioned itself as an extension of the Roman Empire, while in 2015, outspoken white supremacist Richard Spencer encouraged white people to embrace their “forgotten” Roman identities. My aim is not to explain that there is a connection between Classical Antiquity and the Alt-Right, rather, I aim to understand how algorithms on social media sites such as Twitter[1] lead users who engage with content related to ancient history– particularly ancient Greco-Roman history– down an alt-right pipeline.” This is REALLY interesting and useful to know imho.
- Exorcising the Primer: Ok, so this is only really worth reading if you’ve a) a degree of familiarity with Neal Stephenson’s ‘The Diamond Age’ and/or b) if you’ve a particular interest in educational/pedagogical techniques and how technology can help improve them. How many of you left? Eh? Oh. Anyway, for the three of you still reading this, this is a HUGELY-interesting essay on the question of ‘if we were to attempt to design an interactive, exploratory educational/instructional system from scratch, what might that look like?’, using as its base premise the concept of ‘The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’, a fictional device invented by Stephenson which is, very basically, a ‘magical book’ which acts as a dynamic tutor to one of his characters as she grows, and which is basically the most incredible-sounding teacher ever to have been dreamed up in fiction. In this essay, Andy Matuschak talks about what we want from learning, how to create experiences and scenarios that encourage learning and thinking, how technology might be used to prompt curiosity…honestly, this is so so so interesting, and if you like this one then you will also enjoy this essay in response to it by Adrian Hon.
- Why Is Chile So Long?: I know very little about Chile, other than the existence of the Atacama desert and the fact that they have PENGUINS! Now, thanks to this brilliant and properly-interesting article, I also know why it is so very, very long. As you read this, take a moment to consider the country’s geography and what, exactly, it must have been like establishing a civilisation there using nothing but some very hardy and unfortunate donkeys for support. Not sure if I’ve said it before in here, but if you’re ever offered the opportunity to reincarnate, NEVER take the donkey option.
- Fridge Peepers: Economic divination via the medium of fridge readings, basically – this piece profiles a London-based investment manager called Tassos Stassopoulos who, so it’s claimed here, scries the future trends and movements of markets worldwide by perusing the contents of fridges in cities across the world. A rise in demand for fudge flavoured yoghurt in Mumbai means pork bellies are about to take a hit in Montevideo is the very-basic explainer here, a sort of culinary-chaos-theory of taste – actually it’s less witchcraft and more about using certain class-indicating signifiers (aspirational snack consumption, ready-prepared fruit and vegetables, etc) as early-warning signals for larger economic shifts (he says, as though that’s simple), but this is REALLY interesting, and if you’re a certain type of agency person (I KNOW YOU) might be a useful one to send to senior people when you’re next trying to make the ‘WE NEED TO GET OUT INTO THE WORLD AND SEE ACTUAL PEOPLE RATHER THAN JUST SITTING AT HOME WATCHING TIKTOKS OF REAL PEOPLE’ point which I know you make without fail every 24m or so.
- A Roblox Primer: Do YOU want a decent guide to Roblox, what it us, how it works and the sorts of things that brands are doing on it right now? GREAT! This is by the people at Ex Research and might be quite useful to some of you.
- Notes App As Wardrobe Planner: You may well all be aware of this behaviour already, but as someone whose wardrobe consists of ‘the clothes lying on the bed in the spare room’ I confess that ‘outfit planning trends’ rather tend to pass me by. Anyway, apparently it is now A Thing for young people (in the main women) to take snaps of themselves in particular outfits, then take that image as a sticker and drop it into their Notes app, arranged under various headings so they can easily categorise their favourite fits under various categories – work outfits, say, or ‘hot day’ outfits, that sort of thing. Which is partly just a really interesting example of ‘users find use cases for software that devs can never imagine’, and also something that it feels like a smart brand could do something with (the idea of creating personalised irl sticker books for people to populate with their fits feels like a nice touch tbh).
- We All Speak Phone Now: This is written from an annoyingly US-centric perspective – GYAC it’s an English language thing not an American thing! – but feels SO TRUE; effectively this piece talks about the linguistic flattening that’s happened thanks to the smartphone era, the way that, because slang now often arrives and evolves primarily via textual, online media, mediated via a screen, it’s impossible to know who’s using it, and who ‘owns’ it, which means that you lose some of the in-/out-group function that it used to fulfil, which, to crib from the piece’s conclusion, “is a problem because it deprives people of a previously reliable way to know whom they’re talking with and how to treat them. If I hear someone make a remark about the first Velvet Underground album with which I strongly disagree, I am more likely to respond kindly if I know they come from a background different from my own. If a stranger on Twitter says that Nico had pitch problems, I am much more likely to tear into them if they speak the way I do, because I assume they have the cultural experiences, education, and resources that brought me to my own extremely correct opinions. When everyone talks like me, I make the mistake of believing that everyone is like me—and therefore falls into the category of people whom I cut the least slack.”
- The Aesteticisation of Food: Yes, I know, not a word. BUT! It sort of ought to be, at least for this article which looks at the way in which food is being presented in advertising – as in, non-food advertising – in 2024, the semiotics of it, if you will (you don’t have to, honest), and how that might relate to the fact that we are, per the author, living through the skinniest era in years (I am going to have to gently demur here based on my experiences in South London of late – babes, just because everyone in LA and certain parts of Notting Hill is on Ozempic…). I think this topic merits deeper thought than this piece gives it, if I’m honest, but I think it’s a decent start: “Our growing obsession is almost like a modern-day lipstick index, which posits that during economic downturns, sales of smaller indulgences tend to increase. And what could be a smaller indulgence than a fancy little treat? Even when it’s too expensive to travel or buy new clothes, we all have to eat. Food is a universal indulgence. No matter your income, any food can feel like a guilty pleasure “
- Food Miniatures: OH GOD TINY MODELS OF FOOD! I can’t help myself, I go giddy over this stuff – no idea why, I don’t think I ever wanted and failed to get a doll’s house as a kid – and this piece from Vittles, in which Emily Kenway visits an expo at which various vendors of TINY MODELS OF FOOD (honestly I love them!) are flogging their wares, to explore what the appeal is and who collects them and why, and this is not only beautifully-written but also really heartwarming in a slightly-odd way. Thanks to this article I now know that there is a magazine dedicated to this stuff, called Shrunk (obvs), and LOOK HOW CUTE IT IS (must not subscribe, must not subscribe).
- Winter of the Mind: You may recall a few months ago I featured a longread which veered halfway through into becoming a very odd piece about an even odder secret society dedicated to paying attention to things (this one, in fact) – remarkably, this is the second piece this year about the same broad topic, but this time describing a DIFFERENT society dedicated to getting people to really, really pay attention to stuff (although it’s orthogonally-related to the other one, turns out). I really enjoyed this article, in part because it goes a little longer and deeper into the genesis of ‘radical attention’ as a concept, and in part because I think this is something that you could potentially turn into something quite personally/professionally useful (in a very w4nky way). Comes from a similar place to the obliquiscope – the idea of paying deep, persistent attention to an object, system or process is something it feels like we might have fallen out of the habit of doing, maybe bring it back?
- Thoughts on Glastonbury: Not by me, you understand, but by someone who was there this year and who’s done dozens of the things over their lifetime, and who has Some Ideas about what the festival needs to do to keep going. I was interested by this – not least because it’s not just someone going ‘it was better when I was young’, which is about 88% of all festival criticism, but because it takes a fairly dispassionate look at what the crowd is like these days, what punters seemingly want to see and do, and how space is allocated on that basis. The TL;DR here is ‘take some of the space away from the hippies, literally noone cares anymore’ which feels, honestly, pretty much the antithesis of THE GLASTO VIBE (™ – Bottles of authentic ‘Glasto Vibe’ are available from the mail order shop, shipping international, £19.99), but from the point of view of cold, hard commercialism it feels like they are probably right tbh. Then again, though, fcuk commercialism, cap the numbers and keep the hippies imho.
- Water In Sicily: A lovely blogpost from the Scope of Work newsletter, about water supply in Sicily – which, I know, really doesn’t sound like it should be interesting but I am right and you are wrong and you should read it forthwith.
- What’s In A Sex Scene?: This is wonderful. “A lot of ink has been spilled parsing the difference between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. Some might call it arbitrary; others, imaginary. It could be said that one distinction between the two is that in contemporary literary fiction, characters seem rarely allowed to get off. Sex scenes in literature have always been contentious. Since the inception of the novel, detractors and moralists have often accused the form of promoting degenerate behavior and corrupting the morals and impressionable minds of young women. The Literary Review started a “Bad Sex in Fiction Award” in 1993 and laureates include Jonathan Littell, Tom Wolfe, and Morrissey (yes, that one). On the one hand, contemporary literature, like movies, is often accused of being bereft of real eroticism. On the other hand, smutty fiction and erotica is thriving online and increasingly in print as well, albeit subject to the scolding of many more highbrow readers. Everyone’s a critic, so few are having fun. So we asked some of our readers to tell us about their favorite sex scene in a book.” SUPERB – runs the gamut from forced-inlaw-incest-erotica through Twilight by way of Sheila Heti, and it’s interesting and erudite and funny and even, yes, a bit sexy.
- Lewd Vocabulary in Erotic Fiction: A seamless segue there – this is actually a presentation rather than an essay, but, well, it fits better here. Want to know the most and least popular terms used for specific anatomical parts and saucy activities across the gamut of smutty novels? YES YOU DO! Some of this is just astonishing – you mean to tell me that there is smut currently circulating on the market which uses the term ‘milkers’ for breasts?! And that that smut is of a significant enough volume for ‘milkers’ to rank as one of the more popular mammarial euphemisms?! I particularly enjoyed the wordclouds at the end of this which showed readers’ most-loved and most-hated words in erotica – a special shout out to whichever author is peppering their steamy sagas with liberal sprinklings of the oh-so-erotic word ‘clinical’. Seriously, this really is one to be opened up in company so you and your friends and colleagues can go deep (ahem) on this, it is VERY funny indeed.
- Working On Meth: About having a very boring, very menial job, and doing it while getting very, very high on methamphetamine while you’re at work. I really, really like the flatness of this, the matter-of-factness, the way it matches the matter-of-fact demeanour you probably need to keep about you when you’re spending 20 minutes in the toilets huffing rock.
- Whale Fall: This is from 2015, but oddly enough it floated across my field of vision last week and has been rendered current by events in Orkney this week. Rebecca White, in Granta, on a beached whale: “A few years ago I helped push a beached humpback whale back out into the sea, only to witness it return and expire under its own weight on the sand. For the three days that it died the whale was a public attraction. People brought their children down to see it. They would stand in the surf and wave babies in pastel rompers over the whale, as if to catch the drift of an evaporating myth. The whale was black like piano wood and because it was still young, it was pink in the joints under its fins. Every few minutes it exhaled loudly and slammed its fluke against the sand – a tantrum or leverage. Its soft chest turned slack, concertinaed, when it rolled.”
- The Year When My Husband…: The full title of this is “The Year When My Husband Started to Act Like a Tsundere Teenage Girl to Get My Attention” – this is…not a pleasant read, in some respects (it deals with issues of abuse and paedophilia, even if not explicitly described), but it is, I think, very well-written indeed.
- A Pandemic Breakup: Finally in this week’s longreads, a piece I really didn’t want to like when I started reading it but which I had to concede by the end is really, really good – an excerpt from Emily Witt’s forthcoming novel, this segment deals with going out clubbing with her husband just before the pandemic through the breakdown of their marriage and his mind – even if you hate the opening three paragraphs, persist because I promise it’s worth it.
AND NOW, MOVING PICTURES AND SOUNDS!: